


Change Bitter Gall and Blighted Leaves

by Colourofsaying



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Eventual Happy Ending, F/F, Femslash, Femslash Yuletide, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Misses Clause Challenge, Suicidal Thoughts, and she does get much better as the story progresses, only in passing and never dwelt on, we end in a good place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 06:28:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17017473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colourofsaying/pseuds/Colourofsaying
Summary: For many trees, there is no death; there is growing, and there is what comes after growing. A tree that falls in the forest sprouts new life from its body as it lies, crumbling into leaf and mould. A tree that falls to corruption may send forth shoots year after year, decade after decade, waiting until there is one shoot that is strong enough, wise enough, to resist that corruption and grow tall. Unless they fall to axe and saw, a tree may live forever. So Wood-Queens and their people do not die. They sleep, and they forget. They are patient. All things come to fruitfulness in time, and what is time, to a tree?Kasia suffers intensely throughout Uprooted; this is her path back to herself.





	Change Bitter Gall and Blighted Leaves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meguri_aite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meguri_aite/gifts).



For many trees, there is no death; there is growing, and there is what comes after growing. A tree that falls in the forest sprouts new life from its body as it lies, crumbling into leaf and mould. A tree that falls to corruption may send forth shoots year after year, decade after decade, waiting until there is one shoot that is strong enough, wise enough, to resist that corruption and grow tall. Unless they fall to axe and saw, a tree may live forever. So Wood-Queens and their people do not die. They sleep, and they forget. They are patient. All things come to fruitfulness in time, and what is time, to a tree?

 

Losing a daughter to the Dragon is not so terrible. The families of those who are taken do well by it. And so they love us differently, they say, their Dragon-born girls. They say they love us for the time they have us, love us harder, fiercer, stronger. Love us knowing we will leave.

But really, they love us for our futures. Love us for the gold we will send from cities they will never see. Love us for the luck the Dragon sends after we are taken. It’s not hard to lose a daughter to the Dragon, when there are or will be others. It’s not hard to love a Dragon-born girl for what she might bring.

Or perhaps that was only me.

She used to tell me, as she brushed my hair until it shone and gleamed and curled, how she had cried when I was born a girl.

“We looked at you, with your pretty skin and those thick curls, and we knew,” she said. “We knew you would have to be strong.”

She never said she raised me for the Dragon, not out loud, but she told me. As if I could not feel the way she never touched me, except to tidy my hair or dress. As if I did not know that “be strong” was “be taken,” in anyone else’s mouth. As if I could not see that my father would not look at me, except from the corner of his eyes. 

By the time someone told me about the Dragon-born girls, I had known, without knowing, for years, that my parents wanted me to be the one that was taken.

There wasn’t much that I might do to resist it; I thought about it, sometimes, when the Wood whispered in the wind that brushed my windowpanes. I could stop, could go play with Agnieszka, when I was supposed to be learning to bake. Could tear my dresses, dirty my face and hair. Could slide a knife right through my pretty face—and then we would see if the Dragon would want me, scarred and dirty and talentless.

But it would not make my parents want me. They had closed the door in their hearts to me when I was born, and it had grown into place, had set forth roots and branches, and there was no place where I could slip through. There never had been.

I could have run away, too. The book peddlers would have taken me, for one reason or another. I would have preferred one to take me for pity, but had it not been for Agnieszka, I would have gone with any of them for any price at all. At least the terrors they offered me were known, and the choice of them would have been my own. In the wider world, I might have other choices. I could sing—I dreamed of minstrelsy. I could have been a pirate queen.

Leaving might have cured the bitter gall that blighted me, blunted my growth, sapped my heart.But I could not leave Agnieszka; she was my earth. She sustained me.

Agnieszka, who was so beloved, and loved so well. Agnieszka, with her generous hands and generous smile and generous heart. Agnieszka, who the trees followed, at whose feet the forest laid its secrets.

Agnieszka, who loved me, and never thought why. Who loved me more, and with more fierceness, because she thought she would not have me long. Rather than less. Rather than not.

I would not lose even one moment of her, not for ten years of my life, not for all the choices in Polnya. And there was also this: despite the beliefs of my family and Dvernik and the Valley and all I knew of wizards and how they could not stand their own kind (had we ever seen another wizard in the Valley?), I was still afraid that I might lose _her_ to the tower.

And so, I stayed. I stayed, and I kept my dresses neat and my hair in perfect plaits, and I learned to embroider, clean, smile, dance, a simulacrum of perfection to dazzle any wizard’s eyes. To keep her safe.

I was not enough.

 

A tree may stand for many years with a rot eating away inside of it—the whole core may be eaten away, and still the integrity of the bark holds, and the tree stands as if it were not hollow, as if all that made it strong were still there, still holding it up against the wind and the chafing of the deer and the lightning. I stood, so, when Agnieszka was gone. I did not know what else to do.

A book peddler came through Dvernik, and a trader of spices. I could have left; could have smiled at the peddler or winked at the trader, and I would have been in Kralia in a month or so—perhaps not with my virtue, but I hadn’t expected to keep that anyway. There would be work, if I were clever enough, and I had always been clever enough. I could send home money, like the girls who went away, and perhaps then I would be worth the price of my raising.

But I stayed.

I could have let my skirts stain and my hair draggle, could have left my sewing idle in my hands and let my loaves burn, but my hands scrubbed the stains from my skirts and tidied my hair and pulled the bread from the oven before it could scorch without conscious direction.

Always, I felt my mother’s eyes on me—the perfect daughter, the price of their future. The daughter born for the Dragon, that the Dragon had not taken. What use was I, with my shining hair and perfect pastry? A waste, a girl that would marry out and some other woman to get the benefit of her years of sacrifice, and only a farmer’s daughter’s dowry in return. Perhaps if I married a headman there might be something for them in that, but there were few enough of those, and little enough compared to what they had expected the price of my selling to be.

When the wolves came, I thought that they would rend me as they had rent Jerzy’s cattle. They would shred my skin, fill my mind with the Wood’s corruption. The thought of it was a relief. I could rest, no longer face the daily grating of my mother’s disappointment. No longer face the guilt of my own loneliness.

So I went, when no one else would, to fetch the Dragon to Dvernik.

And there she was. Standing there, still as stone, dressed like a queen, her face set and stern. For a moment, she was strange to me—a sorceress from a story, wrapped in furs and magic. But then I saw that she was still because she was trying not to dislodge the complex weave of her hair, and her face was stern with annoyance that she was not up and away once more, and it was alright again, she was with me again, and she was with me in the fire and the night and the fear. She was with me until the Dragon took her from me. She went with him, and she did not look back as she stepped through the portal, and she left me.

 

We didn’t starve that winter. He sent food, a little money. Enough to replace some of the cattle that had died. Perhaps he felt guilty. Perhaps Agnieszka had reminded him that a sheep, a cow, that was wealth for those of us who had no power and no magic. So we did not starve, but recovered, safe behind the wall of ice between our homes and the Wood, and when spring came, Dvernik welcomed it.

The winds were warm and flushed the fields with green. Trees budded out, burst into flower, but my branches were barren. Winter, with its grinding nights and brief gray days, had not left me. I could stand in sunlight for hours, till my skin burned, and never feel its warmth; I was never hungry. There was no life in the core of me, and no one in Dvernik to notice.

No one had touched me since the wolves. Agnieszka was gone.

When the Walkers came for me, I didn’t fight them.

 

I will not remember the journey into the woods. I have forgotten the bite of the Walkers’ angular limbs into my flesh, the way the branches whipped across my arms and face. I do not remember the fruits they fed me, the sickly glint of the heart-fruit, the too-sweet juices, the way they ran down my chin and caught and dried in the skin of my neck and breasts. I do not remember the way the bark closed over me, softly, folding, enclosing me in darkness and a formless maze.

The Wood was the same, different, the same. I know what day I vanished; Agnieszka has told me what day I came back to myself. I couldn’t say how long I was imprisoned there. Time did not pass. It was a thousand years; it was a single moment that stretched on and on and on. All I know is that there was almost nothing of me that survived. Just a seed, a root, stretched deep, deep into my earth, where not even the Wood could find it.

 

Agnieszka will tell you that she had always known I was special, fated. Chosen. She will say that from our earliest years, when someone looked at us, they saw me. If she were noticed at all, she will say, she will think, it would have been for the stains on her dresses and the broken things she left in her wake—for everything about her that no one wanted.

If it can’t bear fruit or put out leaves, or heaven help us, if it wants to _talk_ to her, she’s as lost as the Dragon in Jaga’s spells.

So she never saw the way we looked at her in Dvernik, our Agnieszka, who moved through the forest as easily as the deer. Who the trees loved so much they reached out to touch her skirts, her hair, where anyone could see. Whose family never went hungry, not even on the longest night.

She was loved. She was precious.

And now the song of the sorceress of the Wood is sung in every inn in Polnya. The youngest witch since old Baba Jaga, the pure heart who saw the truth of the queen’s corruption. She saved the hope of Polnya. She cleansed the Wood itself.

It was not originally so flattering; Prince Marek was a hero, and dead, and Agnieszka was a woman, and young. But the triumph of a hero is more welcome than the victory of a villain, and the Wood is easy to blame, so Marek became a tragic hero, and Agnieszka burned with innocence and power, only made stronger by not knowing what she could not do.

A hint, here and there, that she might be Jaga’s daughter, and could therefore perhaps step out of time and place and might appear where her name was spoken badly, was also helpful.

I could think of no other gift to give her, other than my absence. For she was loved and welcome, our heroine, our sorceress stepped out of legend to shape the growth of our world. And she did it for me.

I had become the princess of her fairy tales to save her from the dragon.

She became the sorceress of mine to save me.

 

Agnieszka did not tell me what she had done to save me—when I asked, she looked away, saying,

“I went into the Wood and found you; the Dragon cleansed me. It took me—a while, to find something that would drive the corruption from you. But you’re here now, enough, you’re still not well.”

So I asked the Dragon, one day, when he came to make sure that I was still not corrupted, as if he would not have known.

“She shook the earth itself for you,” he told me. “She nearly died to bring you out of that Wood. She spent months searching for a cure, when I had long given up—I had given up before you were ever brought from the Wood. I did not think it could be done. Perhaps it will not be done again.”

He did not say, perhaps it should never have been done at all. He could not say that. But I knew that she should not have saved me. I knew, long before Prince Marek came. How could I not? The heart tree had transformed me; whatever I was, was not what I had been. When I fell, the ground shook. Cups splintered in my hands. Metal bent under what seemed to me the lightest touch of my fingers.

There was no mirror in my room, but I could tell from the look of my hands and from the skin of my body in the bath that I had changed in outward ways as well; I seemed to be hardened into amber, the long-frozen blood of a long-dead tree. People search for that kind of perfection, spend their money and their time looking for a way to erase those minor imperfections, the blemishes and scabs.

Success is monstrous. No village headman would have me now—no farmer would take me. Even strangers glance away, uncomfortable.

But those were outward things, for all their strangeness—Agnieszka’s changes were deeper. Anyone could feel the magic in her now. It crackled around her, left traces in the air. I could find her anywhere in the tower, just from the spill of magic. She overflowed with it; it almost hurt to meet her eyes.

I wondered how the forest would greet her now, how eager it would be to spill its secrets into her hands, its treasures at her feet. I imagined her in spring, the trees leafing as she walked by, flowers blooming at her touch. She would be barefoot—she always was, as soon as the snow melted. Muddy to the knee, her hands full of the first fruits, and no idea that they would not have been there had she been anyone but herself.

She had always been meant to become this, had always been meant to pour power from her hands in an endless stream. She had been born to paths none of us in Dvernik, no matter how Wood-addled we’d become, could ever see. That I could not see, farmer’s daughter to the bone, no matter how good my cakes and perfect my stitches.

And I’d lost her to the magic, she’d given herself to it, to save me.

How cruel I’d been, to think that I could save her from the Dragon. How cold it was, to be left behind.

 

 

I could see her wondering, that long drive to the capital, to my execution, how I remained so calm. The truth of it was that it was a relief. In the Dragon’s tower, I was always pretending. To the Dragon, a simple village-maid too simple to be changed by her experiences. To Prince Marek, a ghost—the princess Agnieszka had always believed me to be, beautiful, graceful, kind. To the Falcoln, a statue, with no more reaction to all his tests than a stone. To Agnieszka, her friend, unaltered.

It was easier to be what the Queen of Polnya needed me to be—nothing. I combed her hair, brushed the grime from her clothes, was silent. She was silent. I ate when food was given to me, drank when handed water or wine, tipped it into the queen’s mouth. Worried, occasionally, about Agnieszka.

“What will you do in the city?” I asked her, once, when she came by our wagon.

“The Dragon has given me a message for the king,” she said. “He must have soldiers to burn back the Wood.”

“Will the king listen?” I did not think he would. I thought that the Wood would be distant, unreal, in Kralia, a nightmare from a child’s story that only sometimes became real. And Agnieszka was used to being heard; I did not think she would know what to do if she were not.

“The Dragon is his most powerful wizard,” she told me. “He will listen. But enough—are you well?”

“You do not need to worry about us,” I assured her. “We are well cared for.”

“You are kept in a cage, like an animal!”

“It’s only till Kralia,” I said. It did not matter if it was true or not.

“They will see you are not corrupted,” Agnieszka said, fierce. “They will see you’re free of the Wood. Then you will be free.”

“Of course,” I said, and smiled at her.

I did not think I would ever be free of the Wood.

 

When a tree is cut, even if the root is strong, it may never send up new shoots, never reach again for the sky, content to lay in the twigs and leaves and rot, feeding the soil for other trees to grow in. My root did not seem so strong, and I lay quietly, doing what was asked, asking for no more. There was nothing left in me to grow for. The Wood had eaten it out of me, every hope and dream and fantasy of a future that I had ever had, and even my certainties had vanished. There was no place for me in Dvernik anymore, and I could not follow Agnieszka where she had gone. What there was left of me lived in the strength of her love for me, and that I had buried so deep that I was no longer sure that even that part of me truly remained.

But the soil my roots tangled in was rich. Perhaps it was the long hours in the tower with the Willow that began to heal me—she had little patience for wasting a life that had, unaccountably, been returned to me.

“You’re not dead, so?” she told me one day, as she stood grinding at her mortar and pestle.

“No,” I said. It didn’t seem particularly important.

“Then live, or don’t, but choose one or the other,” she said. “Otherwise, you’re just wasting everybody’s time. And make yourself useful while you’re deciding.”

“What would you like me to do?” I asked. The Willow liked for people in her chambers to be annoyed; it made them leave faster. Remaining passive was easier, since I could not leave, and annoyed her, which seemed only fair.

“Find something worth doing,” she said, and turned away, neatly packing her medicine in a waiting jar.

 

Boredom is the great impetus; boredom creates and levels nations. I couldn’t feel anger, or fear, or grief, but I could be bored. It was boredom that drove me from the Willow’s tower—I could have asked if she would teach me, but admitting an interest in healing would’ve meant admitting an interest in life, and I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. Besides, I wasn’t especially interested in healing—it would simply have been something to do, and I was used to being active.

So when the boredom became too much, I simply walked out the door. I expected to be stopped—would have been stopped, weeks or months ago—but the guards had grown lax with nothing to do, and the antechamber was empty. It was boredom that drove me down the stairs and into the garden, and it was boredom that prompted me to answer “Yes, my lady,” when Princess Malgorzhata asked if I would care to have tea with her. I followed her up to her chambers—I did not wonder why they were empty. I did not know, then, that a princess is never completely alone.

“How do you find Kralia?” she asked me. It sounded like a nothing question—sophisticated princess making conversation with the awkward country girl. But her eyes were serious, even though she was smiling. And I was not quite human, anymore, and did not need to be careful.

“I haven’t seen much of it,” I told her. “I don’t care to see more.”

“Why not?” she asked again. Her voice was sober.

“It reminds me of the heart-tree,” I said, and did not realize until I had said it that it was so. “Your healer is kept in a tower; your king cannot look at his queen. There are more doors than there are rooms, and more walls than there are windows. The heart-tree was so; nothing was as it should have been, and there was no escape.”

She did not flinch away from me. Her eyes met mine squarely, and she nodded.

“It has always been so,” she said. “As long as I have been here. But my husband is kind, and I cannot have him and my children and leave Kralia. But now, as you say, the king cannot look at his queen, and the princes do not speak to each other, except through others in the council chamber. Is it true, what they say—that your skin cannot be pierced by weapons?”

“By none that I have found,” I said. I had not—not exactly—tried. It had not mattered.

“Do you like children?” the princess asked me.

The girls taken by the Dragon do not have children, for the most part. They are taken, and they leave, and in that time between, whatever happens to them changes them. They do not marry, even in the city. I had thought—I had said that I thought—that it was that those years when women marry were the ones they spent in the tower, that men did not want an older wife. That the women have spent ten years looking after one man, and think better of spending the rest of their lives doing it for another.

There were, of course, other rumors. I had tried not to hear them, and told Agnieszka it was fine, that I did not want children anyway, and I had mourned the loss of that future I was sure I could not have.

Now, of course, there were other reasons that that future was barred to me. Even if I could have children, I did not know what they would be. And I did not think that any mother would let me care for hers, if I could not have my own. Not as I was.

“I do,” I said. “I have always liked children.”

“Then care for mine, and protect them,” she said. I stared at her. Her voice was even, but her hands were knotted into her skirts, and her face was tense. “You think that I must be mad to trust you—that no good mother would leave her children in the care of someone perhaps corrupted. You are right. I am no good mother—if I were a good mother, I would have died before I brought them into life in Kralia. There is no one who is not corroded by Kralia; I will take my chances on the strength of a woman who could escape the Wood.”

She stood to walk me to the door, and as I turned to leave her, she gripped my hand.

“You must not try again to hurt yourself,” she said. “You must not let yourself be hurt. You are no longer in the Wood, Kasia. Remember it.”

I didn’t dare to squeeze her hand—I was afraid that I might break it.

 

A maid came for me the next day. I followed her down from the Willow’s tower, and into the Princess’s chambers. No one stopped us. That worried me more than anything the Princess had said—for all the guards knew, I was corrupted by the Wood. If I did not kill the Princess and her children outright, I might infect them. The touch of my hand or a breath on their cheek would be enough. If they were loyal, even if they did believe me uncorrupted (and how could they, looking as I did?), they could not let me near. Even the maidservant should not have led me to their chambers; she should have led me to the wizards and let them do what they could with me.

So the Princess was right to be afraid.

“That girl is not loyal to you,” I told the princess, closing the door behind me. She stood to greet me, trailing her velvets and jewels. The room was quiet—I heard no sign of the children. Perhaps she had thought better of her decision. I needed her to have thought better of her decision.

“I know,” she said calmly.

“Your guards are not loyal to you, either,” I said. My voice sounded sharp in my own ears.

“Yes.”

“You have to leave—you have to find someone better than me to help you,” I told her, words tumbling over each other. “You aren’t safe here, and I can’t help you.”

“Why not?”

Lying in the quiet dark of the Willow’s tower, listening to the Queen breathe in, breathe out, so still, I had realized why not. For the first time, I resented it—resented that whether I lived or died depended on this other woman, her life, her marriage. And she could not even rouse herself enough to fight for them.

“The trial.”

“You are certain of the verdict.”

“Whether I am or not doesn’t matter; I cannot promise to take care of your children, when I don’t know that I’ll be alive tomorrow.” How many months of my life had been wasted by this? I was taken; I was corrupted; I was healed; I was condemned. I could not remember when I had last known what the next day held, when I had last made a choice about my own life. How could I make any choice at all when every hour was uncertain? Months of waiting, and still no word—they would waste my life day by day in their wrangling and never notice. For the first time, it angered me.

“I know,” she said. “Why do you think I am asking you?”

So any life at all was a deferred death sentence in Kralia.

There was nothing I could do about my own life, my own death. It was not even mine. It was the King’s, the wizards’, Agnieszka’s by rights, if not by law. Maybe I could do something about theirs. It was something worth doing.

“Someone will have to teach me how to fight,” I said at last. “The only thing I can do with a knife is chop vegetables.”

 

Princess Malgorzhata was the true princess from the fairy tale, the one that Agniezka thought I was. Beautiful and brave and strong, a woman who could wear out three pairs of iron shoes and three iron staves to win back her true love. But what she fought was more insidious, harder to resist, impossible to win against. Every day, she fought for her children’s freedom, and every morning, had to fight for it again.

Stashek was old enough that even Malgorzhata could do little to free him from Kralia’s court, but Marisha played in the garden, had friends who forgot she was a princess, became covered in mud and ate too many cakes and tore her dresses. She could do the things that children do and not know that she was watched. Even Stashek, though, she gave heart-freedom; even here, in Kralia, he loved his father, his mother, his uncle, and knew that he was loved.

It seems like such a little thing, to give your children room to play, to love them and let them love you. But in Kralia, it was not so simple.

Stashek would be king one day, and already there were some who thought to win him with their words and gifts, or to hurt him with their treasons. Loving was dangerous, and being loved uncertain.

Marisha would marry well, would bring the kingdom wealth and allies, might bargain for piece with Rosya. Many of the daughters of the court had fewer freedoms—lessons and beauty the whole of their lives. I was not surprised when Agnieszka told me of her encounter with the treacherous noblewoman. How could she be otherwise, when she had been raised so? Kralia was no place for kindness.

But it might become one. If anyone could change Kralia, it was Malgorzhata. When the king died, when Prince Sigmund became king, then Kralia might become a place where people could be happy.

I found that I wanted to see it.

I wanted to stay with them, the princess, her children, though I hated Kralia, and the lessons in fighting unsettled me. I found that I enjoyed being with the children—it wasn’t motherhood, or even close, but I thought that it was as close as I would get. I wondered if perhaps we could leave Kralia for a time—could go to Gidna, where Malgorzhata was from. Could see the ocean. Maybe there would be a home for me there. Maybe even in Kralia, when Malgorzhata was queen. I found myself wanting to bake again—I wanted to see if I actually liked doing all of those things I learned to do so well.

I almost did not miss Agnieszka.

 

Every day, she came and spoke to me—a word of this, a word of that, what the wizards were doing, her frustrations with the court and her worry about the Wood and the Dragon. A few minutes, half an hour, and she was gone again, in pursuit of dreams and nightmares. She was unhappy here in Kralia, in a way she had not been in the Dragon’s tower. There, she had been sick with longing for Dvernik, for her family, for me. Here, she was afraid, and more so because she could not tell from what direction the danger would come. It was always simple, in the Valley. Danger took many forms, but all of them came from the Wood.

Every day, she came, but she never stayed for long, and there was nothing I could do to ease her fears.

After all, I was one of them.

 

When the war came, I began to wonder. When Prince Sigmund, quiet and scholarly and wise, was sent, instead of Marek, I began to suspect. But there was no evidence, and she was queen, and Polnya loved her. Brave and beautiful, her shorn hair drifting unevenly, her returned voice clear and sure. _Her_ strangeness did not worry them. After all, she was queen, and royalty was not expected to be the same as everyone else. In her, the clarity of her skin and its polished glow were a sign of courage, not corruption.

Only Margholzhata—and, perhaps, the Willow, though I doubted she’d acknowledge it—thought the same of me. And Margholzhata was afraid. She paced her rooms, checking the windows—the curtains must be back, and tied just so. There must be no shadows even a mouse could hide in. The candles were always lit, even at night. If one flickered, she ran to relight it.

I did not think that danger would come from the shadows, when it came. The Wood was patient, but it was not subtle; it did not want to be subtle. Whatever the source of the corruption, it wanted to scrawl its signature across its works.

Her hands were restless. She picked up her embroidery, set it down. Began a letter, stood from her desk after a sentence. Toyed with cups and pens and letter openers. She did not let the children from her sight; always, they played in her sitting room, or sat quietly by her side. I did not like to see them so still; they were too good, too quiet, too aware that something was wrong, trying too hard to make it as right as they could.

When the palace shook and the sky went dark, when Alyosha came running into the princess’s room, it was almost a relief.

“Malghorzhata!” she cried. “Hide them!”

Behind her, I heard a dull thud of boots on stairs. They were not running. The Wood does not need to hurry, as a tree does not hurry to grow. The shape of them is as inevitable as pines, as oaks. If lightning should strike, if they should be starved of light, there will be another. The Wood needs only time, and it has all the time it needs.

Malghorzhata swung Marisha off the floor, grabbed Stashek by the hand. There were not many places to hide in the Princess’s quarters—they were rooms designed for pleasure, not for war. To have them barricaded and strong would say that Kralia was weak, and the kings of Polnya, much like the Wood, have never believed much in the possibility of their own failure. She rushed them into the bedroom.

“Give me a sword,” I said. I could use one, a little. Enough, perhaps. And I could not be harmed by normal blades. Which would have made execution problematic, had the king chosen that path.

“I have none for you,” Alyosha said. “You will have to take one.”

 

I did. There was nothing in my first victim left to be afraid—his eyes were green as leaves, full of shadows. He cut at me with his sword, and the blade recoiled from my skin. I didn’t try to take it from him, living. There was no time.

Humans are very fragile. I am not. I crushed his throat with one hand. There was very little blood.

By the time Agnieszka ran into the room, I was drenched in it.

Even so, I could not save Margholzhata. I could not save Alyosha. I knew too little, and there were too many of them, and they did not care for me.

I cannot forget the way she cried out, the way she stopped. The way they kept attacking her, long after there was nothing left.

And then Agnieszka came, and we ran, Stashek and Marisha clasped in our arms, and the emptiness holding me.

 

It was a gift, when the wagon crumbled and there was no one else to defend them—surely so many of them, surely even I could not kill so many. There was a fall; perhaps the fall could kill me, when their blades could not. Perhaps that would be an ending. I held my sword and I did not look down, not at the drop, not at the blood and other things that stiffened my clothes. I didn’t want to be reminded of what I had done. The soldiers, after all, were no more themselves than Jerzy had been. No more than I had been, when the Dragon chained me in the cell beneath the tower. Their families had loved them no less. Had probably loved them more.

But they had not been saved, as I had been, as Jerzy had been, as the Queen, or what looked like her, had been. So they had died, would be faceless, voiceless. If they were named, they would be named traitors to Polnya. And I had killed them. Margholzhata, Alyosha, my killing had not saved them. It almost didn’t matter that the children were safe.

There was no time to dream of a home by the sea, of time to discover what I did and did not like, but even if there were, the dream had died again in me, sap clogged and galled with blood.

It was a disappointment when the Dragon’s magic caught me, saved me to drink again from the blood the Queen of the Wood poured and poured and poured.

 

I could not even help her when it mattered most. What happened in the Wood, what came from that, nothing in it came from me.

 

The children had to go to Gidna. Kralia was in ruins, the palace shattered, blackened with smoke, clogged with blood. It was no place for children. Perhaps it might become one, after the Dragon’s cleansing. I did not care. Only the children mattered. I had promised.

“You will come back, when the children are in Gidna?” Agnieszka asked me, holding my hands.

“Someday,” I said, and did not mean it. “They’ll need me for a while—they lost so much. And you know I have always wanted to see beyond the Valley.”

“You’ll meet a musician there and learn to tell the stories,” she said, trying to smile. “And when you come back, you’ll be grand and famous and everyone will know your name, Kasia the Bard.”

“I’ll see the ocean,” I said. I could not cry—I thought I should, thought I wanted to. But my roots were so, so dry. There was nothing to feed them, no water to draw from this soil.

She thought I was trying to be brave. The truth was, it was easy—easy to leave the Valley, easy to leave the Tower, easy to leave everything I had ever known. Easy to leave her. Staying would only cause her more pain.

And she would have her family, now, and the Dragon would come back again, whether he thought he would or not. She had her work. She was needed.

I could not bear to watch her searching me for corruption, to see the distrust grow in Dvernik and the Valley from my strangeness. She did not need that burden. She did not need me.

 

Each day in Gidna, I walked by the sea. The Wood has little strength in salt water; I could drown there as easily as any other woman. Easier, perhaps; I did not know how much I weighed, but wooden steps bent deep beneath my feet. I walked by the sea, and I remembered the Queen—Queen Hanna, not the Queen of the Wood. How long had it taken till nothing remained of her at all but memories? How long until the rot had eaten everything away, leaving only the bark? No one had seen that she was corrupt. She had not known that she was corrupt, if she had known anything at all.

So I looked at my hands in the northern light, and sometimes I thought that I saw green curling under the skin, saw leaves in my shadow, branches unfurling behind my eyes in the mirror. We had both been in the heart trees, after all, and the magic and the tests and the saints had all said all was well. How long would it take until the corruption came out in me, until the green filled me again and I was lost in the Wood, and my body did whatever the Queen wanted it to?

Agnieszka had told me that the Queen was gone, had lost herself in growth and stillness with her sister, was no longer in the corruption, but I could not trust it. The corruption was still there. There were still heart-trees, still Walkers, and people still who vanished within them. Every month she wrote me, and told me of what she had found. Of what she had not found. Of the souls that stepped out of the trees, and those that chose to stay.

She did not write me of the souls around the tower, so many of whom were there by my hand. By the Queen’s hand. Even she did not go near it.

I wrote her in return. I told her of the sea, how vast it was, how beautiful. How peaceful, in the stillness of the morning. How wild it was when it stormed. I did not tell her how I walked the cliffs, and judged where the current might best carry me away. How I thought about the salt of the water, that would wash the corruption out of me. I would be clean, then. No one who found me would look up from me with green in their eyes.

I told her how the children were better now. They were; I had seen them, running and running along the beach. Marisha had been laughing; Stashek had not. They had not wanted me for long, not in the safety of Gidna, surrounded again by love, without even the hint of the fear of Kralia. They looked at me, and they saw my strangeness. So I left, before they looked at me and all they saw was what they had lost and what they had seen.

I told her of the generosity of the children’s grandparents. The road to Gidna had been long, and I had told them of that cottage I had dreamed of in Kralia. To me, it was as unreal as a fairy tale. I did not long for it; one does not long for the magic armor, the mountain of glass. It is a dream, and nothing more. But it was a story, and one that passed the time. So when I said that I would go, the Duke and Duchess had given me a cottage by the sea.

It had a fine garden. A good kitchen, with everything a cook might need. Everything comfortable, everything necessary, and some things just for pleasure.

I had yet to light a fire. I had no hunger in me.

Weeds already choked the garden.

 

I lay on the cliffs for days, wind and rain seeping through my clothes. I didn’t feel the cold anymore. No one came near me. I had begun to hear whispers, when people walked by on the cliff path. I ignored them. The sky stretched overhead, blue and gray and black by turns. I could smell the grasses, the salt air. Sometimes, birds came. There was no reason to move, and so I did not. Nothing drove me. No corruption lifted my hand without my choice. No choice lifted my hand. I think I could have lain there forever. There was so much weight—even lifting my hand was an effort. So I did not. My eyes opened, closed, opened. I didn’t think.

Footsteps on the cliff path, a whistle. It was as much a part of the day as the waves below, the gulls. I drifted away from it, staring at the sky.

“ - She killed the king and stole our queen, the wicked witch of Polnya,” the whistler caroled, finishing his song.

I sat up abruptly.

“What is this song that you are singing?” I asked. The man fell backwards, shaken. I suppose I was something to be seen, my clothes faded and torn, my hair unwashed, uncombed. Mud stained my back. My mother would have screamed if she had seen me then. But perhaps he had heard something of me, for he answered quickly enough.

“It is a new song,” he said. “I heard it in the tavern. It tells the story of the death of our king.”

“Sing it to me,” I said. He did—he either had a good ear, or he had heard it many times recently. It was what I had feared. In the song, my Agnieszka was an evil temptress, bound on the kingdom’s destruction, luring Prince Marek into error, murdering the king with her wicked magic and controlling the queen before taking her off into the Wood, never to be seen again. The Dragon had, it seemed, attempted to stop his wayward pupil, and had thwarted her in the end, but it was only Marek’s noble sacrifice that allowed Prince Stashek and Princess Marisha to survive and defeated the wicked witch.

It was very easy to sing, with a rhythm hard to forget. People would sing it across Polnya, if they weren’t already.

I burned with indignation.

“The young King would not care to have his savior sung of in this way,” I told the man. “Take care he does not hear you sing it.”

“It is only a song,” he said. And it was, but I knew what damage a song could do. I stood up, gave my skirts a shake, and marched off to my cabin.

 

That night, I wrote the song of the sorceress of the Wood, fury burning through me. I lit a fire for the first time when night fell, and the flames danced across the paper. The youngest witch since old Baba Jaga, whose purity and courage stood uncorrupted against the Wood, against the terrible plots in the old city, who bravely stood up when no one else would, who saved the hope of Polnya and cleansed the Wood, saving us forever. With a certain amount of glee, I suggested that, if not the daughter of old Jaga, she was her heir, able to step out from time anywhere she liked, able to speak—and listen—across the country.

Here, at last, was something I could do for my Agnieszka. A gift that was not soaked in blood.

I set down my pen and stared into the fire, and finally, I was hungry.

 

It was fortunate that the first song, though easy to sing and catchy, had not been crafted especially carefully. Thinking over the words, it seemed like a rushed piece, something that had been dashed off to profit from the moment. I dressed in my finest clothes, sang it to Stashek and Marisha, sang it to the Duke and Duchess before their entire court. Now I was the eccentric songstress who had been drafting a song to mourn the passing of the king and celebrate the salvation of the children, not the eerie woman on the cliffs. Not the murderess. Clearly I had merely been lost in thought, tortured by my art, rather than mad.

Better words, a noble heroine, a good origin story, and the endorsement of the hope of Polnya, and the other song vanished with less stir than a sea breeze.

I hoped, viciously, that somewhere that bard was gnashing his teeth, wondering what had happened to his song.

Suddenly, I was hungry, ravenous. I ate and ate—pulled weeds from the garden, discovered the vegetables and herbs waiting beneath the overgrowth. I baked, weeded, ate. When I looked in the mirror, I saw myself as I was, now. Too thin, my hair unwashed. I burned the dress I had worn on the cliffs. I took a bath, washed my hair, braided it neatly. The pleasure of it sang through me.

I was restless with wanting, itchy with it, like when the sun shines after weeks of rain. At first, it was my body. I went into the town on market day and bought a pear—the smell of it was intoxicating. The flavor, indescribable. I craved meat, the hot spices of the ground meat pastries. I still did not feel the cold, but I wanted warmth—sunlight, fire, my bed. The colors of my garden astonished me. I felt as though I had never seen such colors before.

And slowly, I turned to wanting with my mind, as well. If corruption was going to take me, it would have done so. It had had months, a year, now, and my hands were still my own, my thoughts belonged to me. The Wood, though not yet clean, had no malignant agency behind it. There was nothing in it that could work me, not here. Not even in the Valley. And had I not endured enough from the Wood?

It was that thought that most astonished me, and I turned it over slowly, coming back to it day after day. I was no stranger to bitterness—my heart was full of it, warped with it. I resented my family for not loving me, Agnieszka for being chosen, for not needing me, the Valley for not accepting me. But it had never occurred to me to resent the Wood for what it had done to me.

So I had gone walking too near the Wood, had not fought when the Walkers took me. I had tempted fate, and fate had taken me, but there was nothing in me that had earned it or any of what had followed, no more than those soldiers had deserved my sword. And that was the Wood, too—should I have let the children die, to save myself from killing? We had all been wounded by the Wood; if I did not hate the soldiers for what they had done to Margholzhata, I could not hate myself for what I had done to them.

And there was another thought—what we had seen in that chamber below the tower. The Wood-Queen, beating against the walls, unable to escape, trapped by those who feared her. Agnieszka had saved her, in the end. She had told me a little of it, enough that I knew that she grieved for what our ancestors had made of her. And she had given her peace—even this creature, who had caused us so much pain.

If she could do so much for the Queen of the Wood—if there had still been enough of her to save—then perhaps there was still plenty left in me.

Agnieszka had already saved me once. I did not need to ask her to again.

 

So I let myself think, I want this. I wanted a flower that grew by the cliffs. I wanted a pretty ring in a merchant’s booth. I wanted to say hello to the woman in the bakery. I wanted to play with the children in the street. I wanted sugar in my tea. I wanted fruit on my table. I wanted bread, butter, a roast chicken. Sometimes, I had what I wanted; sometimes, I did not. It didn’t matter. Wanting, and not wanting, was enough.

As it turned out, I wanted to make bread, but I didn’t want to make pastry. I wanted to raise chickens, but I didn’t want to raise goats. I wanted to grow flowers and fruits and vegetables, but I didn’t want to weed. I didn’t want to wear complicated skirts. I didn’t want to sleep late into the day, I wanted to walk out in the early morning and look at the sun on the waves.

And I wanted Agnieszka, I realized. I wanted to see her, to have her look at me and grin. Sometimes, it felt almost as if she was there—as if I could look up, and there she’d be, barefoot and muddy to the knee, her hair in a tangle, her hands full of treasures. I wanted her in the mornings, to share my tea. I wanted her in the evenings, to sit with by the fire. And I wanted _her—_ I had not known I wanted her. It had not occurred to me that I could want her. We did not know such things were possible, in Dvernik. I did not know if they were possible in Gidna. But I wanted.

I wanted to touch her, to run my fingers over her cheek, her hand, her arm. I wanted to comb her hair through my fingers until it crackled around her head. I wanted to feel her body against mine as we sat next to each other. I wanted to see what her lips tasted like. I wanted to pull her against me, slide my hands under her skirts. My body was hot with wanting her.

She wrote me, and I treasured her letters, but her words were not enough of her—I wanted all of her, her words, her thoughts, her presence, her touch, and I treasured the wanting. Wanting was a pleasure itself, even if there was no chance of having. She did not need me; she had the Valley, the Wood, the Dragon, if she wanted him. She had her family, and friends in plenty. She had told me that Alyosha had lived after all. She had her magic, she had her purpose. So I wanted, and wanting was enough.

 

Agnieszka was not in Gidna, but my cottage was there, and slowly, it began to feel comfortable. My garden flourished, and my table was bountiful. I baked everything I knew how to bake, then worked my garden into my baking—how could I use this herb, this fruit? What flavors could I invent? I filled the window sills with seashells, and the shelves with flowers. It was comfortable there, and I knew my neighbors, and they had grown used to my strangeness. Sometimes, I traded lessons—the woolens my neighbors wove were beautiful, and some of my breads were new to them. Children waved to me when I walked to the shore. Sometimes, I thought, I could make a home there.

But still, I was restless. I had not needed to worry about money—as far as I knew, I never needed to worry about money, since my needs were few and the Duke generous to the strange savior of his grandchildren living in his cliffside cottage—but I was restless without purpose. There was nothing for me to do in Gidna; Stashek and Marisha were safe, happy. There was a baker already, and my garden produced nothing that anyone else’s did not have.

Perhaps I had done enough—it was enough to live, to fill my hours with my home, to be content. Surely, the wonder of the sea was enough, a gift no one in the Valley had ever seen.

Yet when I encountered Stashek in the village one day, and he asked me how I was, I did not say that I was content.

“My lord,” I said, “I would like to see what else the world has in it, and then, perhaps, I can come home.”

He smiled at me, twelve years old and king. It occurred to me, suddenly, that knowing I was nearby had been a solace to him—he was too old for fairy tales, but I was the heroine of his. The woman who could not be hurt by blades, who saved him from the monsters. He had felt safe, with me nearby. But he was king, and his mother had taught him well.

“Then go,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

“I’ll write you, my king,” I said, and I curtsied to him.

 

I went to Rosya first, which was much the same as Polnya, except that people spoke with thicker tongues. Then the rest of the continent, down to the southern seas, and across the sea to the desert beyond. At first, I counted everything that was new—the wideness of the river, the colors of roofs, the foods, the fruits, the trees, the shapes of hats, the styles of dresses, the architecture of homes and shops and palaces. Always, Agnieszka was on my mind—what would she make of this soup? Would she like this necklace? How much would she laugh at the feathers adorning the women of the lower continent? I wrote her constantly, detailing every new thing that I saw.

It wasn’t long before I lost count, though, and began to look for what was the same. The sky, always the same blue. The women carrying their shopping. The butcher’s shop, with its hanging meats. The way that strangers stared at me—though the further south I went, the more it was for the color of my hair than the strange translucence of my skin and the hardness of my flesh. In every place, people loved and worked and lived and died, and in every place I was a stranger.

Nowhere felt like home. No matter how far I traveled, who I met, what I saw, I found no place that was shaped to fit the person I had become. What place is there for a woman with no family, and no intent to make one? I had no friends, either, with whom I might make a home, and little likelihood of making them, as strange as I looked. No matter how skilled a baker, a gardener, a chef, it is uncomfortable for a woman to be alone, unless she is a witch.

So I decided to return to Gidna. There, at least, I was comfortable, and perhaps in time the pressure of my presence would leave an indentation for me, and I would grow into the town as a graft grows into a trunk. But first, I would go back to the Valley, and see Agnieszka, my family. And say goodbye. I did not think I would return to the Valley again.

 

The thought faded as soon as I crested the mountain ridge and looked down across the spread of green, the sparkling river. It looked just like the picture Agnieszka had showed me in the Dragon’s tower, beautiful and serene. There was the town I had learned to bake in, and there, a blur in the distance, was Dvernik. And there was the Wood, a darker green—but Agnieszka was right. It was no longer as threatening as it had been. The trees were in bloom, and even from here I could see birds swooping above their branches in the early morning light.

I rode along the river path. Willows overhung the water. Here and there, women were up and doing the washing already, the low murmur of their talk blending with the murmur of the river. It was hard to think that its smooth, slow flow became a plummeting waterfall somewhere in the forest, for all Agnieszka had told me it was so. From time to time, a thicket of wild roses engulfed me in its scent. There was much to love about the Valley, even if one was no longer tied to it. Perhaps one always felt this way about a home that one had left.

I had left, and I had stayed away, and nothing had changed here. Agnieszka’s life had been no better, no worse. Living by the sea, I barely had her friendship anyway, and I could not protect her—what did I have to lose from speaking? I had more to lose from silence—and there was nothing wrong with me, however strange I looked and however unnatural the origins of my new nature. There never had been anything wrong with me.

I rode around a bend in the river, and there she stood, clutching a child in her arms. I stepped down from my horse and led it to her.

“You’re here!” said Agnieszka. “Thank goodness I’ve come. I had no idea what to do.”

She held out the child towards me. It had green, green eyes, and there were leaves tangled in its hair, and its skin was as woody as my own.

“I think she’s a daughter of the Wood,” she said. “I found her in a clearing, by a heart tree sapling. I think they’re giving us one more chance.”

So I took my own chance. I reached out, took the daughter of the Wood in one arm. I wrapped Agnieszka in the other, and I kissed her, and the sun was bright, bright, bright through the leaves and my closed eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> This is in part inspired by the story of the American chestnut, which is beautifully and powerfully described in The Overstory by Richard Powers. I learned a lot about trees, which I have occasionally misrepresented here. But I like to think of the secret roots of the chestnut tree spreading across the East Coast, sending shoots up every year, even though they are blighted again and again.


End file.
